Deployment & Migration

Do you hate, when launching the Altiris console for the first time, that you have to install those CAB files?

Well, Altiris has provided a neat little utility to install those CAB files for you.

When you want to add a virtual center server to the Altiris Deployment console, you previously would just need the hostname and authentication settings for the virtual center server. As long as you installed the Web Service component in Virtual Center 1.x everything worked just right.

This is a small script to change the Notification Server an Agent is pointing to remotely. It's a very basic script. There is not any error checking nor arguments that can be passed.

The size of the WinPE boot file looks scary when multiple clients are downloading it in a PXE boot. I have found a way to reduce the size of the boot.wim file to 33% less in size than the boot file that Boot Disk Creator creates and of course it downloads 33% faster. The end result should have a 110 Meg size WinPE boot file.

With the recent release of Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 3, Altiris administrators might be taking this opportunity to build a new base image for their environment. There are dozens of ways to build this base image and with more than a dozen documents circulating in the Altiris community related to creating Hardware Independent Images it can be frustrating to find all the information necessary in one document. The purpose of this document is to provide a step-by-step process that walks through every step necessary to build a Hardware Independent Image.

We've been challenged to automate the shutdown of multiple labs of computers. My first thought was to use the Power Control in DS with a reoccurring job. The only problem here is that if the computer is already off, the DS job will turn on the computer to then shut it off, which for me does not make much sense. My second thought was to use Windows initiate the shutdown command through remote script execution of a batch file. One of the important keys to know is the switches for the shutdown command: